1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to navigation on interactive handheld devices and more particularly to tools that implement a user's 3D navigation experience capable of displaying an interactive rendition of 2D and/or 3D audio-visual data accessed by the device locally and/or streamed via remote systems.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Gestural interfaces have become increasedly present in the market during the last few years. Consumer electronics manufacturers such as Nintendo, Apple, Nokia, LG, and Microsoft have all released products that are controlled using interactive gestures. Many of them utilize the motion of the human body or those of handheld controllers to drive users' interaction with videogames, television menu's control and the like.
Most current videogame interfaces on mobile devices like smart phones and tablets already use touch gestures to allow players to execute movements in space or choose actions or commands that are then reflected on-screen. Other categories of hardware devices in the videogames market incorporate gesture driven interfaces such as game consoles like Microsoft xBox™ 360 which use specific hardware (kinect) capable of reading user body motion and/or posture or tracking gesture sequences through a sophisticated implementation of image recognition techniques and augmented (3D depth) camera acquisition. Newer devices, like the Leap Motion Controller generalize some of the motion-tracking paradigm while bringing it out of the videogames domain and into the everyday desktop applications (apps).
Panoramic Imagery Navigation applications, like Google Street View, have incorporated both paradigms of motion and gesture—used alternatively to explore geo-referenced street panoramas.
Speech commands are commonly used in standard applications such as Siri™ (for Apple devices), or Loquendo™ (for PC programs), or the Microsoft Inquisit™ speech recognition engine. When the user speaks a command, the speech recognition system is activated detecting the phonetics and performing the required action. These speech recognition systems usually must be trained to the user's voice.
It would be extremely advantageous to have a system that could take full advantage of the gestural and motion capabilities available to a device using onboard sensors in concert with buttons displayed on the device screen that provides complete navigational capabilities.